07 July 2014

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which Adam Kirsch has called “the best introduction the general reader has ever had to the ‘mother’ of Western Christian civilization,” presents both classics of the medieval canon and lesser-known works in their original languages alongside new English translations. Launched in 2010 and numbering now three dozen volumes, the series spans genres as diverse as biography, travelogues, scientific treatises, and epic and lyric poetry. As rising Harvard junior Jude Russo explains below, this spring’s additions to the series include a volume that’s about as timely as a medieval publication could be.

“For in comparison with Francis, what did Caesar or Alexander do that was worthy of memory? Caesar conquered the foe and Alexander the world, but Francis both. Nor did Francis conquer only the world and the foe, but also himself, conqueror and conquered in the selfsame battle.”

(Henry of Avranches, Life of Francis, 11-15, Trans. David Townsend, DOML 30)

A recent addition to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML), the Saints’ Lives of Henry of Avranches, begins with a life of Francis of Assisi. Written just a few years after Francis’s death, the biography elevates the saint to the company of the great conquerors of the classical world, and even beyond their company, as the saint subdued in himself the concupiscent passions that so famously consumed the ancient rulers. In fourteen books dedicated to Pope Gregory IX, Henry describes these struggles of the saint against the world, the foe, and himself.

The timing of this volume’s release is especially propitious in view of the renewed interest in Francis of Assisi, which is due to another Francis: the current Pope. In his recent Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), the Pope states, “The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”

He echoes the words that Henry puts in the mouth of the saint: “Shall I stand outside and cheat honest men, as I am accustomed, now a buyer of wealth and now a seller: a buyer denigrating everything, and a seller praising everything? The shrewdness of the merchants is trickery and falsehood. It produces profit by another’s loss, barely spares a friend, barely even a brother.” Economic disparity, then as now, was a particularly divisive and urgent issue; Henry shows how Francis embraced poverty, inspired by a spiritual devotion that could not be reconciled with the contemporary state of the Church. The revival of the medieval text in an accessible and affordable edition encourages us to consider the rich legacy of Henry’s Francis as the current pope forges a legacy of his own.

01 May 2014

There’s a certain fluidity to politics, a reliable sense that sooner or later, for better or for worse, the scene will change. Political tactics usually follow those waves; even the most stubborn of actors will eventually abandon a practice that’s become irrelevant. But what happens when the tactic is a human being? What becomes of a family born in symbolism when the day’s semiotics has shifted?

Such questions underlie the fascinating story of the entertainer Josephine Baker and her multi-racial family of twelve adopted children. As do questions about the nature of race itself, and a paradoxical need to strictly delineate its boundaries while performing their obsolescence. As presented by Matthew Pratt Guterl in Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Baker’s eccentric quest also makes us consider fame, and how it enables oddity while simultaneously dismissing its meaning.

In the video below, Guterl introduces Baker and her brood:

You can read more about Josephine Baker as Angelina-antecedent at Slate.

I scarcely noticed the group of German tourists sitting at the table next to mine on the hotel terrace overlooking the Caribbean until one of them leaned over to me and asked in English: “How long did it take you to get that wonderful tan?”

I gave out just the slightest sigh and answered by rote: “About four generations.”

My questioner turned back to his companions and translated. In the ensuing conversation, I thought I heard the word “Nigger” tossed about.

At that particular time, I was fuming over calls to impeach the black United States ambassador to the United Nations for daring to suggest that our country was less than ideal in its handling of human rights issues here, and I was not in any mood to tolerate any racist remarks.

However, I bit my tongue and said nothing; they were, after all, guests at my husband’s hotel. But it did enter my mind to tell them of the fate of the last white man who called my father “Nigger.” He was killed by a blow from a shoe.

The mind wanders to pleasanter times. Paris in the ’30s. Montparnasse and St.-Germain-des-Prés, where the artists and writers flocked in never-ending numbers. I was an asteroid then, in orbit about the brilliant stars: Breton, Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi, Max Ernst, James Joyce, Hemingway, Carlos Williams. Perhaps, I thought, some of their genius would rub off on me. Perhaps a word of encouragement.

12 February 2014

W. E. B. Du Bois, revered as a leading American intellectual of the 20th century, was formed in the nineteenth. After time at Fisk and then Harvard, he went on to the University of Berlin in the early 1890s, where experience outside of the United States contributed greatly to his developing understanding of the nature of racial identity. In Lines of Descent, new this month, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the German world of ideas in which DuBois was immersed, a matrix of philosophical and social scientific inquiry from which ideas about the social construction of race emerged.

An African American traveling to Europe for graduate studies in the late 19th century was no common occurrence, especially for a person of modest means, as was Du Bois. His time at Fisk, in fact, was financed with money donated by neighbors and the congregation of his Great Barrington church. He then worked his way through Harvard, earning a second bachelor’s degree and an MA in history. With his sights set on Germany, Du Bois appealed to the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen, endowed by the philanthropist in 1882.

Here’s Appiah:

Determined to make a scholarly pilgrimage to Germany, Du Bois petitioned the Slater Fund for a fellowship, firing off a series of letters and testimonials to its head, former President Rutherford Hayes—the very man who gained the White House by agreeing to dismantle Reconstruction. (“To properly finish the education thus begun, careful training in a European university for at least a year is, in my mind and in the minds of my professors, indispensable to my greatest usefulness,” the Harvard graduate fellow wrote Hayes.) At last, the fund agreed to provide a stipend for up to two years, and Du Bois, recalling his flush of exhilaration, tells us that, when he left a meeting with President Hayes, the promise of a scholarship secured, he was “walking on air.”

Du Bois’s application for funds was supported by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, who wrote to Hayes of a “young colored man” who’d be just the sort to “invest in” for anyone helping “promising members of that race.” That remarkable letter follows.

Today, we have a bit more news on the book’s reception in China, where it is published by Sanlian: in addition to having sold 700,000 copies there (and counting), it has received a number of prizes. Some of the most notable have included a ranking on the “Annual Top Ten Best Books” list selected by sina.com, China’s largest and most popular internet portal; sohu.com’s Lu Xun Cultural Prize for the “Best History Book of 2013”; a number-one ranking on the China Publishing Group’s list of recommended books; and the “Biography of the Year” award at the Chinese Book Industry Awards hosted by China Publishers, the leading journal of China’s publishing industry.

Finally, Vogel received the China Book Industry Special Contribution Award given by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television of the People’s Republic of China. Founded in 2005, this government award recognizes distinguished foreign authors, publishers and translators who make special contributions in the fields of introducing, translating and publishing Chinese books and promoting cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world. In accepting that award, Vogel said: “I wrote in English for an American audience. It is a special honor to know that Chinese friends feel that my book has also contributed to the Chinese people’s understanding of Deng and his era.”

An author’s personality can help or hurt the attention readers give to his books, and it is sometimes fatal to one’s talent not to have a public with a clear public recognition of one’s size. The way to save your work and reach more readers is to advertise yourself, steal your own favorite page out of Hemingway’s unwritten Notes From Papa On How The Working Novelist Can Get Ahead. Truman Capote did it bravely when he began, and my hat is off to him. James Jones did it, and did it well. Kerouac would deserve ears and tail if he weren’t an Eisenhower gypsy. I, in my turn, would love to be one of the colorful old-young men of American letters, but I have a changeable personality, a sullen disposition, and a calculating mind. I never have good nor accurate interviews since I always seem to get into disagreeable situations with reporters—they sense no matter how pleasant I try to be, that I do not like them—I think the psychological requirement for working on a newspaper is to be a congenital liar and a compulsive patriot. Perhaps I should hire a public relations man to grease my career, but I do not know if I can afford him (not with the size of the job he would have to do for me), and moreover I would be obliged sooner or later to spoil his work. While there would be hardly a limit to how lovable he could make me in the public eye it would be exhausting for me to pretend to be nicer than I really am. Indeed, it would be downright debilitating to the best of my creative energies. So I do not care to approach the public as a lover, nor could I succeed for that matter. I started as a generous but very spoiled boy, and I seem to have turned into a slightly punch-drunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight. I write this not solely out of self-pity (although self-pity is one of my vices) but also to tell the simple truth: I have not gotten nicer as I have grown older, and I suspect that what has been true for me may be true for a great many of you. I’ve burned away too much of my creative energy, and picked up too slowly on the hard, grim, and maybe manly knowledge that if I am to go on saying what my anger tells me it is true to say, I must get better at overriding the indifference which comes from the snobs, arbiters, managers and conforming maniacs who manipulate most of the world of letters and sense at the core of their unconscious that the ambition of a writer like myself is to become consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful. It will be fine if I can write so well and so strongly as to call my shot, but unfortunately I may have fatigued the earth of rich language beyond repair. I do not know, but it is possible. I’ve been in too many fights, I’ve been hit on the head by a hammer, and had my left eye gouged in a street fight—and of course I’m proud of this (I was a physical coward as a child), and so I’m proud I learned a bit about fighting even though the cost may end as waste. There may have been too many fights for me, too much sex, liquor, marijuana, benzedrine and seconal, much too much ridiculous and brain-blasting rage at the minuscule frustrations of a most loathsome literary world, necrophilic to the core—they murder their writers, and then decorate their graves.

07 January 2013

In Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII, Robert A. Ventresca gives us an authoritative and even-handed portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most caricatured figures. In Ventresca’s telling we see the development of a flawed and gifted man whose pontificate was defined by the Cold War and the church’s engagement with the modern world, not his response to Nazism. In the passage below, excerpted from the Introduction to Soldier of Christ, Ventresca recounts the decades-long battles over the legacy of Pius XII.

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In death, much more so than in life, Pius XII has become an intensely polarizing figure—to some, he is a venerable saint, and to others he is a damnable silent witness to unimaginable atrocities in the heart of Christian Europe. The incessant partisanship of the so-called Pius War has consistently sacrificed historical interpretation for polemical and political purposes. This pattern is evident even within the Catholic world, where, from the time of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the figure of Pius XII has served as a lightning rod for both nostalgic conservatives and disgruntled liberals. For the former, Pius XII was the last truly magisterial pontiff; for the latter, he embodied everything that was wrong with the Catholic Church before the affable John XXIII (Roncalli), the “good pope,” came to air out the static, stultifying atmosphere of the church before Vatican II. This elementary division was evident even at the time of the council when Pope Paul VI (Montini) officially began the process to bring beatification and perhaps eventually sainthood to both of his immediate predecessors. Recommending the causes of both Pius XII and John XXIII, Pope Paul VI reasoned, “will be in answer to the desire that has been expressed by innumerable voices in favor of each of these
Popes. In this way, history will be assured the patrimony of their spiritual legacy.”

Montini, who worked side-by-side with Pius XII throughout the tumultuous war years, was keen to craft an alternative narrative to the one taking shape in people’s minds in the wake of Hochhuth’s controversial play [The Deputy, a highly influential 1963 drama about Pius XII’s wartime activities]. Tellingly, two years before he formally opened the cause to have Pius XII made a saint, when he was still the cardinal archbishop of Milan, Montini wrote to the British Catholic periodical The Tablet to challenge Hochhuth’s reading of a history Montini himself had lived. “History,” the future Paul VI wrote, “will vindicate the conduct of Pius XII when confronted by the criminal excesses of the Nazi regime.” For Montini, history would set the record straight; it was the only effective antidote to Hochhuth’s version, which amounted to little more than the “artificial manipulation of facts to fit a preconceived idea.”

Despite Paul VI’s belief that the path to sainthood for both popes would proceed “for no motive other than the cult of their holiness,” it was clear even to outside observers that internal church politics would come into play. Referring to Pius XII, the New York Times reported that the “austere, distant and intellectual Pope has become the focus of conservative admiration.” By contrast, his successor, John XXIII, who was described as “warmly human and simple,” was said to be the “favorite” of the so-called progressives, if only because he had convened the Second Vatican Council, at which the “progressive” views seem to have prevailed.

And so it has been, back and forth, for decades now. Despite occasional lulls in the Pius War, a dogged attachment to competing caricatures of Pius XII, to say nothing of the canonization cause, means that the war of words will persist, generating point and counterpoint ad infinitum. The tendency to see Pius XII as less a man than an institution has resulted in an abundant manipulation of facts—to borrow from Montini—arranged selectively to fit preconceived notions of what this pope did or did not do; what he said or did not say; what he could have or should have done. I leave it to the reader to decide whether history has vindicated Pius XII, whatever that means. It is to history, after all, that we must turn to find Eugenio Pacelli, the man, priest, diplomat, and pope.

The vast literature chronicling Pius XII’s long and eventful pontificate has mostly centered on his seeming failure to speak out clearly and firmly during World War II to defend European Jews facing systematic persecution and murder by the Nazis. The claim that he turned his back on the Jews, and the riposte it provoked, gave life and sustenance to the “Pius War.” Yet this war of words has done more harm than good to our understanding of this central figure of twentieth-century history. With very few exceptions, studies of Pius XII have offered a distorted or highly selective picture of the subject. We have become accustomed to reading interpretive leaps, which are grounded on counterfactual or normative claims about what the pope could have or should have done rather than a reasoned assessment of what he did or did not do—and why. This is to say nothing of the fact that, as understandable as it is, such a heavy focus on Pius XII’s wartime record has obscured our view of the entire span of his active life in the service of the papacy. It is easy to forget that Pacelli’s pontificate lasted for thirteen years after the end of World War II. We know comparatively little about the Cold War years and even less about
Pius XII’s prodigious teachings, which sought to address internal and external realities of Catholicism in rapidly changing times. However we might assess it, there can be no doubt that Eugenio Pacelli’s pontificate left an indelible mark on the papacy and influenced the Catholic encounter with the modern world in ways we have scarcely begun to understand.

The writings of the founders are so rich that putting them aside even for a moment becomes difficult, and rereading them often sways the reader first one way and then another. But the outcomes of the founders’ battles with one another are quite clear. During the period 1789–1816, the Federalists under Washington, Hamilton, and Adams won every important fight for the initial twelve years. Then the Republicans under Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin did the same for the next fifteen years. Throughout these twenty-seven years, there was ceaseless, fervent, and bitter conflict among the founders. The spirit of compromise had peaked at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and did not return to that level until about 1817, by which time the Federalist Party lay in ruins.

During the Washington administration—when Hamilton served as secretary of the treasury,
Jefferson as secretary of state, and Madison as de facto leader of the House—Hamilton won and Jefferson and Madison lost every battle: over funding the national debt at par, over federal assumption of state debts, over the creation of the Bank of the United States, over the building of the six frigates for the navy, and over the Jay Treaty and the use of trade sanctions against Britain. Madison and Jefferson pushed this latter policy very hard. Hamilton fought it on the grounds that the Treasury, burdened with interest payments on the colossal national debt, could not sustain the loss of revenues from tariffs on British imports.

These patterns of the founders’ thinking—and of outcomes—continued unchanged for several years after the three men left office: Jefferson in 1793, Hamilton in 1795, and Madison in 1797. During the years when they were ostensibly out of power, all three remained extremely influential. Jefferson served as vice president from 1797 to 1801, and although he had little clout within the government, he continued to build an opposition party outside it.

From 1794 to 1796, the Jay Treaty dominated national politics. In the eyes of Washington and Hamilton, the success of this treaty represented the only chance to avert war with Britain and avoid a catastrophic blow to the Treasury. By contrast, for Jefferson and Madison the Jay Treaty symbolized the Washington administration’s favoritism to the British at the expense of the French. For them, it provided further evidence of Hamilton’s attempts to introduce British ways of corrupt government into the purified American system.

Hamilton’s forces won this crucial fight, though only through the direct intervention of Washington. There was nothing inevitable about this result. Hamilton and his allies prevailed with the bare minimum of the required two-thirds vote for ratification of the treaty by the Senate (20 to 10), and a very narrow House vote of 51 to 48 for providing funds to implement its terms. The Federalists triumphed yet again in passing their ill-advised Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but again only by an initial 52-to-48 House vote. Thus, during each of the three Federalist presidential administrations from 1789 to 1801—two terms under Washington, one under John Adams—the Federalists won every big political fight. But they could easily have lost some of them.

30 October 2012

To most outsiders with little actual knowledge of the faith or its history, the most distinctive feature of Mormonism is likely polygamy. Indeed, the practice of taking multiple wives is the most well-known casualty of Utah’s incorporation into the United States, and of Mormonism’s drift toward mainstream Christianity. But, as John Turner’s new biography of Brigham Young helps us to see, the most radical social experimentation of early Mormonism may have been its anti-capitalism, not its deregulation of the marriage market.

Writing at the LA Review of Books, Mike Davis (who knows from radical social movements), takes from Turner’s book the notion that Mormonism before Young’s death represented “the most ambitious” social experiment in American history, the creation of a society that “explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism.” As Davis highlights, exposure to the fallout of that Victorian capitalism during his missionary work in England may have helped to shape Young’s stance. From Turner:

Young had known grinding poverty and periodic hunger throughout much of his life, but the squalor of English cities still gave him pause. “I for get how menny bagers [beggars] I saw,” he told Mary Ann, “but enuph to take all the pennes [pennies] and copers I can get.” The United States had not yet recovered from the banking panic of 1837, but the English situation was far bleaker. “[W]hen I look at the difrents betwene poore People here and in America,” he concluded to Mary Ann, “I rejoice that you and the children are there.”

As Davis recounts, back across the Atlantic Brigham Young “tirelessly preached the impossibility of coexistence between the communitarian values of Zion and the greed-driven capitalism of Babylon (the United States).” What we have in Turner’s book, then, in addition to an even-handed account of Mormonism’s leading light, is a depiction of the Church’s mostly forgotten socialist past. And while much common skepticism of Mormonism focuses on the undergarments and the vague occultism, Davis dismisses all that as just so much “religious mumbo-jumbo,” a common mark of any secretive set. To Davis, “the real scandal” of Mormonism is how far its current believers have come from the fiery communitarian vision of Young.

In a long piece on Mormonism’s history and meanings, based on readings of Turner’s book and several others, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik characterizes the evolution of Mormonism as a “victory of Gilded Age capitalism over Great Awakening spiritualism,” a “squalid turn toward vulgar prosperity” that doubled as a “sane turn toward social peace” in its resolution of the conflict between Young’s Utah and the United States. As Gopnik puts it, “this sublimation of the energy of the faith into the energy of commerce seems always to have marked (Mormonism) afterward.”

Of course, the most famous of the latter-day Latter-Day Saints is presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, no one’s idea of a socialist. And so, in closing his piece, Gopnik asks the present vantage’s logical question: “To what degree is Mormonism responsible for Mitt Romney?”

(C)lass surely tells more than creed when it comes to American manners, and Romney is better understood as a late-twentieth-century American tycoon than as any kind of believer… In another way, though, this is precisely where faith really does walk in, since commerce and belief seem complementary in Romney’s tradition. It’s just that this tradition is not merely Mormon. Joseph Smith’s strange faith has become a denomination within the bigger creed of commerce… Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth… this gospel of prosperity is the one American faith that will never fail, even when its promises seem ruined. Elsewhere among the Western democracies, the bursting of the last bubble has led to doubts about the system that blows them. Here the people who seem likely to inherit power are those who want to blow still bigger ones, who believe in the bubble even after it has burst, and who hold its perfection as a faith so gleaming and secure and unbreakable that it might once have been written down somewhere by angels, on solid-gold plates.

That a faith can paper over its roots and evolve to oppose the views of its pioneer prophet doesn’t mean its followers lose the will to believe.

04 May 2012

Kenneth W. Mack’s Representing the Race is a collective biography of a group of African American civil rights lawyers during the era of segregation. Mack moves away from the standard telling of 20th century American race relations (“stories of protest and accommodation, heroes and villains, assimilation and black separatism, movement building and backlash, progress and retrenchment”) to focus instead on what he calls an “enduring paradox” of race relations:

From their beginnings, Americans imagined that they inhabited a country composed of distinct racial, ethnic, and religious groups that somehow constituted a unified nation—an idea that, for some, is encapsulated in their historic national motto, e pluribus unum. Just as assuredly, since the time of the nation’s founding Americans have imagined that certain minority groups fit uneasily, or perhaps not at all, into the national whole. Among the most prominent of these groups have been African Americans, and what has connected this particular minority group to the larger nation has been its representatives—those who claimed to speak for, stand in for, and advocate for the interests of the larger group.

The usual story of black civil rights lawyers in American history is that these lawyers represented the interests of a unified minority group that wanted to be integrated into the core fabric of the nation—or, as more-recent accounts have described them, perhaps these lawyers failed at their task of representation. But the story was not so simple as either of these accounts would have it. Rather, from their beginnings, black civil rights lawyers were people caught between the needs and desires of the larger, white-dominated culture, and those of their own racial group, and there was no simple way out of that dilemma.

We recently spoke with Mack about the book, and in the video below he describes how the career of Thurgood Marshall, the most famous figure he discusses in Representing the Race, demonstrates the challenging melding of authenticity and exceptionalism still demanded of those said to “represent a race.”

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The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.